Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize Winner

The Nobel Prize in Literature goes to Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk.

On the Nobel site they simply write: "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures".

I have his 'Istanbul' book. I took it away as a memory of my life in Istanbul and it's delicious to read straight through or visit with, dipping in and out of his remembered life in that city.

Erkan once speculated on the powerfully negative response Pamuk sometimes earns back home in Turkey ... I believe, he is well beyond the gatekeepers of Turkish literature, that is, he is difficult to classify and analyze.

He is successful, he managed to be a best selling but unread novelists. So there must also be an element of jealousy.

He does not have any particular political allegiances.

He is too elite to be liked by leftists, too modern to be liked by islamists, too liberal to be liked by Kemalists, too westernist to be liked by nationalists...